LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STANFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Judith Porten, the mother of Edward Gibbon, was the third and youngest daughter of Mr. James Porten, a merchant of London. She died in December, 1747, leaving the maternal care of her son to her sister, Miss Catherine Porten, the "Aunt Kitty" of the later correspondence, to whom this letter is addressed. After her father's commercial ruin, Miss Catherine Porten opened a boarding-house for Westminster School, in College Street. Under her care Gibbon spent the two years which he passed at Westminster. He entered the school in January, 1748, and was placed in the second form.
[2] This endorsement is in the handwriting of his stepmother, the second Mrs. Gibbon.
[3] "M. Pavilliard has described to me the astonishment with which he gazed on Mr. Gibbon standing before him; a thin little figure, with a large head, disputing and urging, with the greatest ability, all the best arguments that had ever been used in favour of popery." [Lord Sheffield.]
[4] Voltaire lived from 1755 to 1758 at les Délices near Geneva, and within Genevan territory.
[5] It is probable that this was the Mr. Taaffe who, with Mr. Wortley Montagu and Lord Southwell, invited a Jew named Abraham Payba to dine with them at Montagu's lodgings in Paris, in September, 1751. Having made him drunk, they won from him in less than an hour eight hundred louis d'or. Their debtor paid them with drafts which he knew would be dishonoured. Finding themselves outwitted, Taaffe and Montagu broke into Payba's house, and possessed themselves of a considerable sum of money and a quantity of jewellery. For this offence they were imprisoned for three months in the Grand Châtelet (Nichols' Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, vol. iv. pp. 629-634).
[6] Miss Hester Gibbon died unmarried in 1790, at the age of eighty-six, at King's Cliffe in Northamptonshire. William Law, the author of the Serious Call, originally her brother's tutor at Putney, afterwards her almoner, spiritual adviser and guide, died at her house in 1761. In the tomb which she caused to be built for him, she was also herself buried. Hester Gibbon is stated to have been the Miranda of the Serious Call; but her age at the date when the book was published (1728) makes this doubtful.
[7] The second daughter of Mr. James Porten married Mr. Darrel of Richmond, and left two sons, Edward and Robert.